The Red and the White
by A.A. Pessimal
Summary: born out of a one-paragraph short which had potential. Set in Lancre, a long time before the present, with three suspiciously familiar Witches who may be Ancestors. Lancre has a Castle. But how did it come to be? In our age, Alice Band speculates. As she knows well, Folklore and History have the answers. birdwhistle's "Antiquities Of Ye Kingdomme of Lancre" is consulted...
1. Things that go bump in the night

_**The Red and the White**_

_**A longer tale based on a single paragraph written for The Ankh-Morpork Times – News of The Disc on Facebook. I wrote a one paragraph response to a posting, recognised its ultimate source (primal British myth shared by Celt, Saxon and Norman alike), and thought – why stop here? **_

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_

_**To: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**Good idea to go after the publishing rights to books by long-dead authors who are well out of copyright and who have no living descendents. This spares the bother of having to deal with authors who make unrealistic demands for payment. **_**And**_** their literary agents, who tend to be somewhat tenacious. But are you sure there's a market? **_

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**To: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_

_**There is a most assured market, sir. The current trend among readers is for romantic folklore and fables from a long-gone Golden Age where everything was simper and easier and somehow purer in intention and morality. I firmly believe a re-issue of Birdwhistle's Legendes And Antiquities Of The Ramtops will be a popular read, at a modest $AM3.99 per copy. **_

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_

_**To: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**But the little difficulty here is that Birdwhistle is written in Old. The archaisms make the text somewhat difficult to comprehend, as do the antiquities of spelling? **_

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**To: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_

_**I have thought of that, sir. I propose to hire skilled writers who can re-interpret Lancre folklore for the modern reader. Perhaps the young ladies who were responsible for the smash-hit books for children, the "Leonora the Explorer" series?1**_**(1) **_**As Miss Wiggs is a skilled illustrator, there is the bonus that in-line pictures can be provided to break up the wall of text. And her friend is skilled in the use of words.**_

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_

_**To: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**THOSE two young ladies? This brings us back to author payments again. I thought the advantage of this was to**_** avoid**_** paying authors? And do I remind you that **_**these**_** authors have **_**Literary Agents?**

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**To: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_

_**I've given them a sample story, sir. Just to see how they get on, with no commitment to publish. I have also taken the precaution of ensuring their literary agents are aware, so as to avoid a repetition of the last set of negotiations. **_

* * *

_**Ye Desmene of Lancrre, in the Reyne of ye Kingge who is Yclept Uther Penferret, from ye Mysste of Antiquittie; **_

_**A Tale From the Dawn Age of the Ramtops Kingdom of Lancre. Of the Founding of Lancre Castle.**_

_**Historical Note and Introduction: prepared by Miss Alice Band (Guild of Historians), principal tutor in History, Archaeology (Stealth and Conventional), Climbing, Traps, Evasion and Archery, at the Assassins' Guild School. **_

History is an attempt to understand the past through the considered evaluation of the available evidence. After you've carefully evaluated that available evidence for reliability and veracity, everything you build on that is subjective and it becomes a matter of opinion. The majority opinion then becomes History. Everything else becomes Conjecture, Anecdotal Evidence and Unsubstantiated Opinion. Another word for Conjecture, Anecdotal Evidence and Unsubstantiated Opinion is, of course, Folklore. Which is intrinsically of little value, despite the fact the stories have persisted for millennia, often in the oral tradition, and only started to be collected and written down by people like Mr Birdwhistle several centuries ago. Historians will point out that a mark of the civilization of the Latatian Empire is that they took great care to write everything down, a mark of their superiority over the lesser barbarian peoples they sought to civilise. We have a wealth of written accounts, say of the three or four days of animal slaughter and ritualised bloody combat in the great arenas, to justify this opinion.

The oral account, stories passed down the generations over thousands of years, is considered unreliable as a historical source. Yet those accounts often carry a germ of truth and preserve the essential facts of a story, even if somewhat embellished. As a historian, I understand this and seek to incorporate this into my own teaching. There is no fixed definite line at which unreliable Folklore becomes objective and correct History, after all. We can be reasonably sure a city called Ankh-Morpork exists and has done so for a long time. But can we be certain its founders were twin foundlings who were nurtured and succoured by hippopotami? What credence can we put on the story that tells us the city was built on an island created over centuries by an accumulation of hippo dung?

We live in a world built on Folklore and explained by History.

In this spirit I commend to you this volume of stories of the Antiquities of the Ramtops, which has been prepared by two senior students of mine who I know have grasped the lessons I seek to teach my pupils. In fact, they are going to get a deserved extra credit for their work in re-interpreting Birdwhistle to a modern readership. I really didn't need to do much editing at all, apart from an occasional suggestion or correction. Yes, there is embellishment in the original Tales, and a certain amount of reflection of the preoccupations and prejudices of Birdwhistle's time. But formal history, and (where permissible in Lancre) archaeology**(2)2,** have repeatedly proven the essential veracity of the stories. These events happened. But maybe not quite as the authors have chosen to present them. That, dear reader, is History.

_Alice Band, DiPE, B.A., , _

_**On the founding of Lancre Castle**_

_**Lancre Town, perhaps 1500 years before the present day**_

The three Witches sat on a grassy bank just outside the hamlet of Lancre and watched the day. A peat fire was putting a stream of more-or-less nearly fragrant smoke into the air, from one of the wattle-and-daub roughly thatched houses. The thin peat smoke spiralled up through the aperture provided in the point of the thatched roof**.3(3)** A few pigs foraged half-heartedly; the sound of repeated clanging and hammering came from the hamlet's smithy. It was a place where the menfolk would gather to avoid work and cluster in the warmth of the forge whilst Jacyn Ogg, in his stolid way, got on with things.

They looked up to the fort on the high promontory in the thoughtfully disapproving way that was common to Witches. A historian, were there any in the vicinity, might have identified that old fort as a typically Latatian milecastle, put here to provide shelter for a minimal garrison tasked with keeping the wild tribe of the Lancrastria thoroughly pacified. A passing archaeologist might have looked at the site thoughtfully and remarked that under that square boxy building, there'd be an older hill-fort typical of the mountain tribes.

Witches looked at the place and nodded greetings to the confused looking shaggy man clad in animal skins and resting a stone club on one shoulder; they were also on first-name terms with the fierce warrior queen who drove a spectral chariot, with insubstantial scythes on the wheels, who regularly patrolled her ancestral lands; and they consoled with the men in Latatian uniform, who pined for far-away Brindisi, men whose post-mortem fate was to patrol the battlements of a fort in a land that was alternately rainy and snowy and rarely warm, and where you couldn't get a decent pasta to save your Afterlife**. (4)**

Witches knew the history of their land. It was one of their jobs. They even got to talk to it occasionally.

They looked up to the stalled reconstruction work up the hill, with a certain dispassionate stoicism.

"It'll all be the same in another two thousand years, Nim." one said.

The Witch called Nim considered this and gave a little shrug.

"Reckon you may be correct there, Gerontia." she agreed.

They looked up to where a group of baffled and head-scratching masons, standing amidst the rubble and the fallen stones, were regarding the latest wreck of the building site. A cloaked figure they recognised as King Uther stood off to one side. He looked unhappy. The fact his chosen Queen was next to him, hands on hips and looking furious, possibly contributed to this.

And then there was…

"King wants a Castle." Gerontia Ogg remarked. "Queen wants one worthy of his status as a monarch."

"By which, she really means _hers._" Nimue Weatherwax agreed. "Queens are buggers for that sort of thing. She's itchin' to start hangin' tapestries and curtains and drapes and banners and things, but she can't do that, not till he's got the extension built on the old fort. Meanwhile, she's gettin' all _frustrated_ at him. Not good in a King. He's going to want to come out and burn something. Or somebody. You mark my words."

"Errr.. what is the probllem, exactlly?" the third and youngest Witch asked. The older two looked at her tolerantly. They were not that much older: this was not an age where people lived to a very great age. At most, Nimue Weatherwax was pushing thirty. She just had the look of a far older woman about her. Gerontia Ogg might have been twenty-five. But she had already become mother to six children, and was developing a cheerfully rounded look to her. The third Witch was barely eighteen. Technically she shouldn't have been in Lancre at all; she belonged to a neighbouring country with which Lancre regularly had disputes, over the metaphorical garden fence. It could get so bad that King Uther had issued a Royal Decree forbidding Llamedosians to remain overnight in the realm of Lancre. Any Llamedosian, in fact, seen in the realm during the hours of darkness could legally be slain with the longbow or any other offensive weapon that came easily to hand.

Nobody ever tried to enforce this one on Morgana Garlleg.

She was from Llamedos, yes. But she was a Witch. A consideration was that nobody wanted Nimue Weatherwax coming round to point this out. And she was, people agreed, basically okay for a bloody Llamedosian and did good. She was alright. Went on a bit, but alright.

"I mean, every time they builld something and make a start on the new castlle, they go away at the end of the day, and during the night it allll falllls down again."

Nimue Weatherwax glared at the woebegone looking masons and builders at the top of the hill, who were now being berated by a furious Queen. Then she patiently**(5)** explained to Morgana what the problem was.

"Oh." the young witch said, digesting. "Shoulldn't we, you know, tellll them, or something?"

Nimue Weatherwax shook her head.

"Not my place to." She said. "I'm not one for going where I'm not wanted. They'll just have to work it out for themselves."

She nodded up the hill again.

"'sides. The King has got _him_ for an advisor. He can bloody well advise."

King Uther Penferret was not a happy King. He wanted a Castle. Just here, on the highest point overlooking Lancre Gorge, built next to and in the fullness of time, _over_, the old Latatian fort which at the moment served him as castle and palace. Building stone was being quarried and bought, at a ruinous price, from the Dwarfs and the Trolls. It was one of those arrangements that the co-sentient species of Lancre had evolved. The Dwarfs asked the Trolls where they could safely quarry; the local Trolls obliged, erecting barriers and warning signs around areas where old Trolls had retired to sleep and dream their days away. Both sides saw the sense of not, for e.g., being awoken from deep thought with a pickaxe in your ear, or else having several tons of formerly static granite scream in rage and tear your head off. Humans saw the wisdom of not buying building stone with recognisable faces in it.**(6) **Everyone got on. It was one of the good things about Lancre.

Witches were respected here. It was even accepted that every so often, the King himself might discreetly pop round to the most senior witch available, for a cup of tea and a discreet chat. The King was an absolute ruler; he'd never ever dream of _taking advice_ from a subject, oh no, and certainly not from a common old woman with no breeding. But you had to take an interest now and again as to what the _common people_ thought. And you couldn't get any commoner than Gerontia Ogg, for instance.

But all that had changed with the coming of the Queen, who wasn't from round here. She came from a tiny kingdom on the faraway coast nearby to Hergen, and she had forn ideas. One of those had been her inviting a Court Wizard to take residence. Better than those cantankerous, ill-dressed, uneducated and rather _smelly _peasant women. A Court Wizard would raise the tone of the place. Besides, other Queens would be jealous.

Mention of _him_ made Nimue Weatherwax's teeth grate.

* * *

King Uther put the guilty thought out of his head that he'd been rather ignoring the Witches lately, and he looked down into what would become the foundations of his new Castle. The walls of what would become the dungeons and sub-dungeons were still there, lining the deeply dug pit, but only just. Rubble and building blocks were everywhere. Every time, every damn time, they cleared the mess and started building above ground, something happened.

"Well?" he asked.

The long, thin, Court Wizard stroked his white beard thoughtfully, and leant on his staff.

"There are several working theories, Lord King." he said. "Localised earthquakes…"

"During the night? Every damn night? _For the past two months_?"

"Lancre is mountainous, Lord King. Mountains are pushed up by subterranean activity and it is just possible that the action of two tectonic plates a long way below our feet is pushing upwards and…"

Uther let the words drone on in the usual unstoppable way. He looked down the slope to the town and let his eyes pass over the three Witches.

_They're just sitting there. The Weatherwax woman is biding her time…_

"Or else the earth-spirits are displeased." the wizard said, adjusting his voice to _talking-to-Kings_.

The King allowed the Wizard to ramble on. And on. And on. He felt a horrible icy sensation that the other shoe was going to drop.

* * *

_**Historical Note by Miss Alice Band (Guild of Historians), principal tutor in History, Archaeology (Stealth and Conventional), Climbing, Traps, Evasion and Archery, at the Assassins' Guild School. **_

The promontory overlooking the Lancre River is a high craggy slope that looms up over the town which grew around it. It is easy to see why there has always been a fortification of some sort here: high places overlooking places of strategic importance have always been magnets for defensive positions as they tend to be high, steep, easy to defend, and places of refuge for the population in times of trouble.

My own extended stay there some years ago offered me the privilege of visiting the Castle as it currently is. At the time I had not been invited to join the Guild of Assassins, but I could clearly see how defensible the position is and how any invading force would need to settle down to a long and problematic siege. The obvious question – as both Historian and Archaeologist – was why on earth such a small nation, bordered by the Chalk Baronetcy, Llamedos and Near Überwald, none of which could these days be called plausible foes – would _need _such a strong complex fortress, which in its building must have consumed a vast part of the nation's economic resources. Finding out the historical reasons for this intrigued me.

I was fortunate enough, following a difficult expedition to find something out concerning the archaeology of this land (which did not go entirely according to plan), to have made a local friend in the form of Mrs Gytha Ogg, whose family has been in this place for a long time**.(7)** 7Mrs Ogg is consequently a fount of local folklore, and she generously shared this with me over hospitality and drinks. She also made an introduction on my behalf to King Verence II and to Queen Magrat, who were sympathetic to my recent difficulties and who graciously allowed me full access to the National Archives, housed in the Castle. I was thus in a position any Historian would be grateful for: the opportunity to research, read and verify the records of an entire country. Among other things, this allowed me to cross-reference the hard copy against the tales related to me by Mrs Ogg. I was also able to perform passive archaeology on the Castle site – with, by request, strictly no digging or excavating – to visually assess how the Castle had evolved over the millenia.

The archaeological and historical record fitted remarkably well with the broad tale presented in the folklore.

There has always been a fortification on this site. The earliest evidence is of a succession of hill-forts built on the high place by the earliest inhabitants. Before this, the very earliest tales hint, there were caves and diggings that people used for shelter back in the Stone Age. The hill fort, ditches and earth banks, was taken by the Latatians in the time of the Great Empire. Queen Magrat showed me items kept in the Castle museum, testament to the ferocity of those battles: the torso of a human skeleton, whose spine has been split by a deeply embedded crossbow bolt consistent with Latatian making. That penetrated from the _front_**.(8)** 8Her Majesty also advised me that this sort of thing crops up all the time, and showed me boxes full of retrieved weapons, lead and stone slingshots, fragments of Latatian military equipment; swords in bronze and iron that are useless for ongoing use but which even today are dug up and retrieved in the area. (Such a shame no professional archaeologists were present; the area is now probably spoilt for systematic study)

The Latatians, having captured the hill-fort, soon found it necessary to build a fortress here: I was able to trace its outline and realised this was not just a mile-fort, but a fully-fledged _castrum_, suggesting they found it necessary to build a far larger fortress here than the place apparently needed.

In turn, that Latatian castrum persisted long after the people who built it left. Successive warlords and minor Kings used it even as it decayed, with stone plundered for other building and gaps in the walls replaced by crude wooden palisades. (I found what may have been post-holes for such makeshift walls, but was hampered by the prohibition on my digging _anywhere_.)

This persisted for perhaps five hundred years, until King Uther Penferret arose as a strong, capable, monarch who unified several smaller contending fiefdoms into the Knigdom of Lancre**(9),** and who authorised the first reconstruction of what evolved in time into Lancre Castle as we know it today.

But why such a big Castle?

Mrs Ogg grinned at me.

"Loads of tunnels underneath, love." she said, mysteriously. "Nobody's ever explored them all. Not even Dwarfs."

The mystery deepened.

* * *

Morganna Garlleg walked the forest path, scowling at nothing in particular. She'd spent the morning, in her steading at the hamlet of BræþEsolcweorne, **(10)** dealing with a sheep with the staggers, a cow with the Dropsical Blight, and a human with bad feet. That last had not been pleasant.

She made a noise halfway between a sigh and a snarl. She hadn't meant to settle in Lancre. Llamedos and Lancre were deadly enemies. A King of Llamedos had put effort into creating his own border wall, Offla's Dike**.(11).** He had then said, any Lancastrian, right, who steps over this here earth bank will feel the wrath. You listening over there, boyos?

This hadn't stopped Lancre raiding into Llamedos. And vice-versa.

Morganna had been taken prisoner in a raid on her village. She had felt vaguely disappointed none of them had tried to, well, _you know_. She felt that as if it was some sort of concealed insult. In fact, the leader of the raiders had said something in the crude Gods-awful Morporkian tongue along the lines of "Gordon Bennett, you bloody daft sods, why did you take _her_? She's a bloody _witch_, you dozy buggers! She's trouble we don't need!"

Technically a slave and a thrall, nobody had pressed the point very much or tried to exert ownership rights.

Morganna had met the other local Witches and as if by some unspoken agreement, she had joined them to practice the Craft in her new country. Nimue Weatherwax did this sort of thing to people. Morgana had realised she _could_ have walked back home to Llamedos – lots of people went home again. Initially taken as thralls, they realised the Lancrastrians were a bit half-hearted about actually _keeping_ slaves, it was enough to make the point to the neighbours by taking them. So they seemed at a loss as to what to actually _do_ with people once they were taken, and many simply went back home again. But something had made her stay. Nimue had off-handedly mentioned that BræþEsolcweorne needed a Witch, and if she had a mind, why not stay? Doesn't matter you're Llamedosian, I'll come with you and have a word or two, just to _explain_. And Morganna had stayed. There was something about this place…

Morganna walked on into a clearing. She wasn't surprised to see the three ravens, who looked at her with the sort of expressions on their beaks that suggested they were sniggering. She took care to greet them.

"Oh, piss off, why don't you?" she suggested.

That was another irritation. Her parents had been bad at spelling. They'd been aiming at calling her Morrigan, after the local goddess of war. Parental dyslexia had turned it into Morganna, which didn't evoke very much at all. And local people couldn't get the hang of the "ll" sound; they persisted in pronouncing her family name as if she were a smelly, but admittedly nutritious and tasty, vegetable. She wondered how her life might have turned out as an avatar of the war goddess, then straightened her shoulders and walked on. She was due to meet the others on Witch business

* * *

Gerontia Ogg smiled benevolently at her oldest daughter, who had succeeded in setting and lighting a fire.

"You done well there." she said. "If you rolls your dice right, I might just let you do this every night!"

Her daughter beamed back in genuine pleasure and pride. Gerontia looked over to the next two oldest daughters, who were preparing dinner.

"That goes for you, too." she said, generously.

Gerontia sat back and smiled to herself. Her house was one of the best-kept in the village. The revolutionary new _chimney_, an indoor flue built in brick and stone, put paid to the central hearth with the hole in the roof above it that didn't _quite_ let all the smoke out, but unerringly allowed all the rain _in_. She'd got her husband and brothers to close it over at the same time they'd built the chimney flue. She smiled again. In the chaos up at the Castle, her brother Nefyl had managed to liberate enough building materials to do a bit of work about the place. It wasn't as if they'd miss any, and it was just sitting there doing nothing while the Thing That Happened In The Night was going on…

Gerontia allowed herself a moment's pride in a cleaner drier house, and savoured the cooking smell from the hearth, as well as the familiar smell of her home-brew drifting in from the shed at the back. Brewing was also a Witch skill.

_Got to go out and see the girls later, but there's time for a bite to eat and drink first…_

* * *

Nimue Weatherwax scowled not only to herself, but at the rest of the world around her, on general principles. She'd had an interesting and eventful day.

It had all begun in the early morning. Checking that nobody else was around, she had walked down to a secluded and well-screened stretch of the River and had stripped down to her shift. Ensuring her clothing was secure, she had steeled herself, walked into the River, and set about washing all the bits. You know. The bits you needed to do every so often.

The Lancre river widened out a bit here. Not quite a lake, but it got wider. Out in midstream there was a strong current, as the flow strengthened, drawn by the gorge and the Falls. But if you knew where to look, there was a placid pool. Bloody cold, but no inconvenient rip-tides.

Nimue stayed there for long enough to complete her immediate business, and conceded that if you toughed it out for long enough, you got used to the cold water. She allowed herself to lie full length in the stream and got as near as she could to a relaxed state. She contemplated the local situation and felt her fists clenching as her default state of repressed furious anger began to emerge.

_Warlords and Kings has always consulted Witches. You know, when they needs a bit of guidance or a prompt to set them on the right path. A word in their ear, sometimes. Uther's not a bad man. Allus used to talk to me, or Gerontia, when he felt the need. _

Nimue tried to put it out of her head that the King might, in his single days, have found reasons other than State to consult Gerontia Ogg. She had that effect on a certain sort of man.

_But then he married that bloody girl. The uppity one. Out of Kornawhack or whatever they calls it, small Kingdom on the other side of Llamedos and Hergen, speaks a language a bit like Llamedosian. I'll concede the clotted cream is a good idea, but you'd not like to eat too much of it. And the King got a few useful tin mines out there as a dowry. It's payin' for this new Castle he wants. Or rather, _**she**_ wants. Bloody woman with her forn ideas. Hmmph. Towers with them upturned ice-cream cones on top. Silly notion. What's wrong with good honest battlements? But no, it's the new idea, a King needs a Castle, by which she means __**she**__ wants a castle. And he's got to pay for it, to keep her sweet._

Nimue began to fume slightly. An observer on the bank might have witnessed the water around her beginning to bubble and steam slightly. The same intrepid observer might have glimpsed the motion of alarmed fish swimming quickly away from where things were starting to get too hot for them. Gerontia Ogg, were she present, might have remarked that most people might add heat to their bathwater in more conventional ways, including one that made the water slightly more amber-coloured.

Nimue Weatherwax didn't need it. She had her datum state of bubbling anger to keep the water warm.

_And he don't come to Witches no more. She put paid to that. A Court Wizard, she said. An educated man, she said. Adds tone. Adds class to a Court. A man with degrees from Unseen University. Claims to be a sixth-level Wizard, as if that flummery matters. Ye Gods, she'll be gettin' a Court Jester next. As funny as a dose of the sweating fever and half as welcome. _

Nimue knew, in a way she couldn't fully articulate, that this was an offence to the natural way of things. Kings, princes, knights and soforth came to Witches for advice. Even if it was discreetly and by night. They allus had and they allus would.

_In this country, Witches do the guidin' and the advisin'. I remember my grandmother tellin' me that when the Latatians were here, their head nob, the Prefect, come down from the fort to speak to, what were them words, read 'em in an old book once, the _**P****ythonissa** _or the _**Auguratrix**_**. **__Well, I'm the Auguratrix round these parts. And just right now I needs to be as auguratricksy as I damn well can. _

Nimue was vaguely aware of distant voices. She scowled again, and decided it would be best to get out and get dressed. Just when she was getting comfortable, too. She appreciated the water warming up for her and put it down to ambient magic.

She stood up in the water and felt pain, More discomfort, really, underneath her feet, discomfort that felt wrong for a stone. Curiosity took over and she reached down, groping down into the river bed.

_Ah. One of _**those**_… dangerous bloody things. Could have cut my foot open on that._

She raised the thing up in her right hand, noting it weighed maybe five or six pounds, and casually threw it towards the bank…

"And that, my Lord King, is how we know the world to be banana-shaped."

King Uther Penferret nodded, as he walked alongside his Court Wizard.

"This new learning of yours amazes me, Sir Wizard." he said, with studied politeness.

"I thank you, sire." said the wizard. "Research at Unseen University has come up with an idea that may be germane here. It concerns how the bladder of the common sheep, _Ovis Aries_, may be used to prevent earthquakes…"

He was cut short as a large metal object boomeranged towards them, shedding rust flakes. It narrowly missed the King and bounced off a nearby tree. Both Wizard and King, as they took an early-morning stroll alongside the river, followed the trajectory back to the slenderly built, but still imposing, dark-haired woman who was up to her knees in river, wearing only a pale linen shift. She glared at them and defiantly folded her arms.

King Uther nodded to her, then walked over to where the sword had fallen and picked it up. He assessed it, critically.

"A bit rusty." he remarked. "But scrape the rust off and it might be serviceable. Could get enough useful metal to make a shorter poignard, perhaps. What do you think, Marvin?"

"_Merddyn_, sire." the wizard corrected him, in a manner that suggested he was used to this. He looked over to the Lady in the Lake. And something _pinged_ inside him. He couldn't draw his eyes away from her.

"Errr… good morrow, Mistress Weatherwax." the King said, uneasily. He'd not spoken to her since shortly after his marriage. The Queen had forbidden it, saying it wasn't _seemly_, it detracted from the dignity of the office, and anyway they were largely cantankerous ill-educated illiterate smelly old peasant women. Even the _young_ ones.

Nimue nodded at him. She did not unfold her arms.

"Errr… I'm sorry I've not spoken to you for…"

"Things to do. Kingdom to run. I know how it is." Nimue said, cutting him short. "_Queen to deal with_."

"I can't help noticing you just threw a sword at me, Mistress Weatherwax." the King continued.

"I threw a sword, I'll admit." Nimue replied. "Nasty rusty old thing, shouldn't have been in the river in the first place."

She glared at her King again. He blinked. Technically he could have her executed. But he was bright enough to see practical difficulties with that course of action.

"I'll take the point of view you salvaged an antique." Uther said, hurriedly. "And quite properly, it counts under law as treasure trove, to be surrendered to the Crown. The actions of a loyal subject… err, _citizen_…"

Nimue nodded.

"Glad to hear it." she said. "And if you two are _gentlemen_, you can turn your backs while I get dressed…"

She noted the Wizard staring at her as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. She felt vaguely flattered.

"That includes _you_, Mister Wizard." she said.

A little later she was walking with King and Wizard.

"You know, Sire. A mysterious and if I may say so, mystical, young woman who emerges from the waters to give a sword to the rightful King. That idea has a certain _mythical_ quality." The wizard Marvin, or Mervin, or whatever his damn-fool name was, chundered on.

"She threw it at me, Wizard. And may I say it's rusty as Hell?"

"That need not matter, sire. Only the three of us here saw the sword. We can lodge it in the Royal Armoury and substitute something more fitting? To be so described in the Annals of the Kingdom for posterity? And in the _here-and-now_, to strengthen your claim to the Kingship?"

Nimue listened with half an ear as the wizard chundered on. She examined him. Tall, thin, spare, grey hair with a hint of an original brown in it, not ageless but somewhere between fifty and ninety. He carried the inevitable staff, with the equally inevitable knob on the end, and was dressed in the usual tasteless, but somewhat faded, gaudy robes preferred by Unseen University's alumni. She assessed him with a witch's eye.

_Half con-artist. Can talk the back legs off a donkey. Uses long words. A lot. Knows he's on a good pasture and determined to dig in and stay. But watch him. It ain't all bunco. There's magic in there too. _

"So you are a witch, my dear?" he said, in a patronisingly unctuous voice.

"Folk recognise me as one, I'll admit." Nimue said.

The wizard smiled a greasy smile. She kept her face purposely poker.

"Ah, yes. We aren't completely unreasonable. We accept the, ah, distaff side is also capable of using the magickal flux, to a limited degree."

Nimue looked at him. She wasn't sure which part of his last sentence had been most irritating to her. It was the _reasonableness_, she reflected, later. That, and the way he put a completely un-necessary "k" into the word "magic", and even pronounced it.

"_Do_ go on." she invited him. She noticed the King winced. The wizard ploughed on, completely oblivious to the warning signs.

"The air suddenly feels a little _close_." King Uther remarked, apropos of nothing. "Do you think it might develop into a thunderstorm later?"

"Happen it might." Nimue replied.

"Well." The Wizard said, clearing his throat portentously. "We actually welcome women having limited access to the magickal flux. Heavens, we're not living in the Bronze Age any more! Obviously, women cannot have access to the Higher Magic and the Great Art. Oh, no. Their minds are not geared up to the Great Pure Work, for one thing. It is also accepted wisdom that the female brain can actually explode if subjected to an unfamiliar need for intellectual analysis. It is a kindness to steer them away from this."

"Yes." Nimue said, slowly and deliberately. "I can see why Wizards think this is so."

Thunder rumbled out over distant Copperhead Mountain. The King winced.

"We should get back to the Palace." he said. "Before it _really_ begins."

"However." The wizard said, "It is right there should be a class of women who can handle the small, everyday, currency of everyday magick. You know, fertility of the crop, care of domestic animals, oh, and small children. The Healing Arts. We hold this in esteem, believe it or not. That there are Witches in the world performing their appointed tasks frees up the Wizards to handle the greater matters, that which is truly important in Magick. So we are not diverted from our higher calling by triviality."

He looked hopefully at Nimue.

"My dear, would you like to witness what a Great wizard can do?"

Nimue realised, with horror and repugnance, that she was being _courted_. And that she was about to witness a mating display. She tried not to shudder at the thought. But decided to play along. Just for now.

"Yes, please." she said, appraising the wizard Marvin, or Mervin, or whatever his name was. "you know, I rather believe I would, Mr Wizard."

The King looked at Nimue Weatherwax, recognised the expression on her face, and tried not to whimper.

Thunder rolled down from Copperhead Mountain again.

And this time there was also lightning.

* * *

_**End of Part One – this one got a bit longer than I thought! More to come. **_

* * *

** (1)** to my _**Discworld Tarot**_ story, _the Six of Swords_, in which two girls with a talent come up with an Idea. Then present it to a publisher. _**Then**_ ask a Literary Agent to look after their percentage. .

** (2) **Alice Band has very good reason to emphasise that Lancre is a place where archaeology is not always practicable, permissible or even advisible. See my story _**The Lancre Caper.**_

**(3)** the sort designed to let not nearly all the smoke _out,_ but which was guaranteed to let most of the rain _in_.

_** (4)**_ And who regularly had to dodge the scary mad angry screaming woman in the chariot with the bloody scythes on the hubcaps. It got no better after you were dead.

** (5)** To Weatherwax standards of "patience", that is.

** (6)** It made it impossible to plausibly deny knowledge if that troll's family then turned up to ask why you turned poor Auntie Obsidia into a supporting lintel and a fornicated arch, why you do that, you fornicating human?

** (7)** Shameless plug: to my tale _**The Lancre Caper**_, in which a young Alice Band realises why you don't do the A-word in Lancre, however Stealthy you are.

** (8)** Found, in our world, at a former Celtic hill-fort in Somerset which even General Vespasian found hard to capture even with a whole Roman army behind him.

** (9)** his spelling wasn't brilliant

** (10)** Considering the literal versions of a placename: originally Asyn Drwg, renamed Malumasinum by the Latatians, and then BræþEsolcweorne in Old Morporkian. Gunning, as you might have guessed, for literal translations of "Bad Ass" in Welsh, Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Although – according to the Anglo-Saxon translation engine I found – this version of the name would mean "Smelly donkey" in modern English…

** (11)** There were rumours about his Queen, although not anywhere she could hear them.

** (12)** Thanks to Jake Campbell and Maureen Fedarb

* * *

_**Notes Dump**_

_**Where the magic(k)al fallout from a misunderstanding between a Wizard and a Witch is safely contained. **_

_**Not a lot, really – also sketching out ideas for Part Two of "Strandpiel" and writing isolated episodes, which one day will be linked together. Got as far as Bekki's steading in Howondaland, some of her patents, aunt Mariella getting into trouble, and Sissi N'kima's return to Ankh-Morpork where she pays for advanced tuition in political Science by working as a Teaching Assistant at the Guild School. And gets Famke the Tykebomb as a pupil. **_

**Original story: **

_**On the FB site, a page of a mediaeval manuscript showing two dragons locked in battle was repurposed with the legend **_

_**For just five shillings a month**_

_**You can provide dragons like these**_

_**With the food and shelter and medical attention they need**_

_**Act now! **_**(12)**

_**The idea was to present it as a flyer for the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons. Recognising the source, I wrote a quick paragraph:**_

Ah, the Llamedosian Red and the Chalk White playing out their age-old enmity. This bloody Wizard turned up and said it was a metaphor for something or other, two peoples locked in age old enmity, but as he chundered on about it for so long, a local Witch called Nimue Jenkins locked him in a soundproof crystal box in a vain attempt to shut him up - local myth says he's still there, explaining poetic metaphor and its place in history, to this day...

_**Since then I've been having Ideas to repurpose this as a longer story. As you do. **_

_**I'm not sure if the longer story will fit here – so in the spirit of recent musings on elephants with wings, the "original" is going here together with credit for the inspiration, and the expanded and reworked story will fit in elsewhere. **_

_**Yes, I do know the title is half in Danish – couldn't find an online translator for Anglo-Saxon, so Danish will have to stand in, for now.**_


	2. Witch Talk

_**Y Coch a'r y Gwyn – det Røde og det Hvide**_

_**The Red and the White**_

_**Or even **_

_**Wægn îsig ac dôð read**_

_**A longer tale based on a single paragraph written for The Ankh-Morpork Times – News of The Disc on Facebook. I wrote a one paragraph response to a posting, recognised its ultimate source (primal British myth shared by Celt, Saxon and Norman alike), and thought – why stop here? **_

_**Short interim chapter - might be a little while before i can get back to it - life at the moment felels like work-sleep-work... here the witches talk comparative linguistics... **_

* * *

_**Historical Note, prepared by Miss Alice Band (Guild of Historians), principal tutor in History, Archaeology (Stealth and Conventional), Climbing, Traps, Evasion and Archery, at the Assassins' Guild School. **_

The relationship between history, narrative, fact and fiction is so much more fluid and interesting than anyone imagines.

* * *

"Hmmph." Nimue Weatherwax said. She'd had a trying day.

The two other Witches watched her, cautiously.

"This new Queen." Morgana Garlleg said, tentatively.

"What about her?" asked Nimue, tetchily.

"Wellll. She's the probllllem, isn't she?"

"_Could_ be a nice girl. But she's bin brung up wrong. Get her used to Lancre and our ways of thinkin', and you never know." Gerontia Ogg remarked.

"Bloody spoilt brat, if you asks me." Nimue grunted. "Things hereabouts was…. _satisfactory_… till Uther took it into his head to go out and get a wife. Daft bugger."

"Only natural, Nim." Gerontia Ogg said. She was twenty-eight and on her second husband. **(1)**

"I grant it's different for kings." Nimue ploughed on, with an expression on her face suggesting she was exploring a mouth ulcer with her tongue. "So he has to go looking for a spare Princess some other King has got to spare. Then he gets one, from that country in forn parts where they gives the wheat a thumpin'. What do they call it, _Corn-a-Whack_…"

Mogranna Garlleg sighed slightly.

"_Kernawac_, Nimue." she said, patiently. "It's not _that_ far away. A llittlllle country, in between Llamedos and Hergen. They speak a llanguage like ours. Rellated to Llamedosian."

"Says he's heard they has a fair and lovely Princess, generous, gentle, easy on the eye, modest, delightful of character, all her own teeth. And this King Mark says, oh, I got one of those, why not drop by and make an offer? Then after Uther signs the marriage contact unseen, silly bugger, Mark tells him, actually, _that's_ my older daughter, she's spoken for, this is her little sister…"

"And he travels off to that place, what do they call it, _Tint-A-Girl_, realises he's been had, but King Mark signs over a dowry of rich tin mines to sweeten the deal, and he gets _this_ one. The _spare_."

"_Tintagel._" Morganna said, patiently, but Nimue wasn't quite listening.

"_Tint-A-Girl_. Hah!" Nimue said. "Nobody gets that sort of blonde hair naturally. Some serious tintin' went on with _that_ girl!"

"Well, act'lly, Nim. Up towards the Hub they says people are born with hair that shade. Pretty common up there, they says. And them Hublandish buggers is a problem on the coast. Come round in their longships rapin' and pillagin'…"

Nimue wasn't listening to Gerontia either. Hublandish raiders in longships weren't much of a problem in a landlocked country several hundred miles inland**.(2)** Somebody else's problem.

"Vain little bugger. And dim as a penny candle." Nimue said, dismissively. "And what has this _Corn-a-Whack_ place got, anyway? Clotted cream in tin cans? Nothin' much to be proud of."

"Uther should have thought on." Gerontia said. "If he reads the note sayin', Spare Princess, Yours To A Good Kingdom, All Serious Offers Considered, and her father throws in a couple of tin mines as part of the deal, what's that sayin'? It's sayin', _Desperate Father Driven Spare By Demanding Grasping Little Madam, I Needs To Get Shot Before She Drives Me Mad_, that's what it's sayin'."

"And he fell for it. And we gets her." Nimue said. She shook her head. "What's her name, Grainier. What sort of a name is that when it's at home? _Grainer_? As in _More Cornier Than Usual_?"

"Err.. Nimue? It's a Hergenian name, originalllly…" Morganna was ignored.

"Grainier." Nimue repeated. "As in "_really blurry picture which when you gets up close is full of gritty smeary blurry bits_"

"Well, actualllly…"

"Hergenian names." Gerontia mused.

"Peoplle in Kernawac speak a llanguage like Llamedosian." Morgana said, getting in quickly. "We're on one side. Hergen's on the other. So their language has llots of Hergenian in it. _Gràinne_ is a fertillity Goddess in Hergen. She makes the barley and the corn grow. The King named his younger daughter after her. It does no harm to name a child after a Goddess. Especialllly a Goddess from the more powerfull country next door where the warriors get touchy. But it's the Kernawacesian spelling of a Hergenian name. Errr."

"Hergenian names." Gerontia mused.

"Pronounced _Gron-ya_." Morganna interposed, quickly.

"An' it's spelt G-R-A-I-N-N-E." Nimue said, darkly. " _Gron-ya._ What sort of spellin' is THAT?"

Nimue spoke with the outrage of one whose education was basic, who had learnt basic literacy slowly, doggedly and painfully, who was now seeing hard-learnt principles of orthography and representation of spoken sounds being ripped up by people from forn parts, with no idea as to how the letters of the alphabet were supposed to behave on the page.

"Says _Grainier_, to my mind. We got twenty-nine letters of the alphabet**.(3)** They all got sounds. Can't have people from forn parts goin' around givin' 'em new sounds. No wonder people ends up speakin' foreign, if they gives perfectly good letters the wrong sounds. And Hergenian's worse than Llamedosian for that sort of goin'-on."

"Apparently some God put a geese on the Hergenians, back in the dawn of Time." Gerontia remarked. "Cursed 'em with a great curse, that however they _said_ their names, when they wrote 'em down on paper they'd look nothin' like. Which means they gets all _stroppy_ when people can't say 'em right."

The witches considered this.

"As if Hergenians _needs_ a reason to get stroppy and pick a fight." Nimue remarked.

"They had this warlord once. Called _Colin_. Thing is, his name was _Cu Chullain_ or something. And if anyone couldn't pronounce it proper, which was _everyone_, he flew into a right strop and thumped six kinds out of people. All down to this bloody Goddess called Errata, 'cos she made damn sure his name got writ down the way it was."

There was a brief silence. Gerontia filled it.

"Met this Hergenian witch called Siobhan, once." Gerontia said. "Got sisters, called Medhbh and Niamh."

Gerontia then spelt out the names as they appeared on paper. There was a short silence.

"Shiv-VAUGHN". Nimue said, darkly. "_May-ve. Neeve_. In what _possible_ language is there a "V" in there?" **(4)**

"Hergenian." Morgana said, quickly. "Llamedosian does the same. With our "-dd-" sound… err…"

"So you puts two D's back-to back in Llamedosian and it becomes a sort of _vee_ sound?" Nimue said, exploring the unfamiliar concept of mutable consonants.

"Well, so does we." Gerontia said. "A "P" is one thing. But bung a "h" next to it, an'…"

"Hmmph." Nimue said, her grunt expressing deep dissatisfaction with un-necessary subtleties in linguistics. There was a longer silence. The Witches contemplated.

"This business up at the Castle." Morganna said, trying to prompt the discussion down a different avenue. "The King keeps trying to build a new castle. But every night it falls down again."

"I got a good idea." Nimue said. She did not elaborate.

"Went well at first." Gerontia remarked. "New queen comes home, she gets all appalled at the livin' conditions, demands a better castle like the one her mum and dad have. Nags at Uther, he gives in, so he gets Dwarfs in, grasping little buggers, to dig into the hill, so as to make the dungeons and the sub-dungeons what Her Nibs says is essential to a castle."

She took a drink.

"So them little sods, you have to say they're good at diggin', get three sub-floors of dungeon together and set up the foundations to support everythin' that has to go above. Weigh heavy, do castle walls. All's goin' well. Then Her Nibs asks 'em to go _deeper._"

"One of them _oubliyettey_ things." Nimue said. "A deep pit you can chuck people in if they gets _annoyin'_. She sez any modern castle needs one."

"They'll end up usin' it as a garderobe pit." Gerontia said. "Mark my words."

"And by then, they've already gone deep. But she wants 'em to go deeper still. And Uther's payin', so they get stuck in and she gets her oubliette."

Nimue took a reflective sip.

"They gets down fifty feet or so, then them Dwarfs what are diggin' come back up quicker than a rat up a drainpipe. They has a conversation in Dwarfish, everyone downs picks, they sounds worried, then they up sticks and buggered off sharpish, not a word to anyone. Never bin seen since."

Morgana looked worried.

"They say there are tunnells and caves underneath the Castle Mount." Morgana said. Her voice faltered for an instant.

"Oh, we got them alright, love!" Gerontia agreed. "Every bloody where in Lancre."

"So what if…" Morgana's voice dropped. "The Dwarfs dug too deep, opened a long-forgotten pit, lleading to the dark realm of Annwyn, and returned a great evil to the world?"

The other two considered this.

"Nah." Gerontia said. "Good thought, love, but Balgrogs is extinct. Last of 'em got killed by this bloody wizard, or so he claims, durin' the Dark Wars**."(5)**

"Just like a man." Nimue said. "See an endangered species, and make it even _more _endangered. Hmmph."

Gerontia gave her old friend a sly appraising grin.

"And how are you getting' on with that wizard, anyway? You bin seein' a lot of him these last few days, I notices."

* * *

_**It might be a while before I get back to this – so I'm keen to give the readership something to be getting on with…**_ _**call this an interim half-chapter, for now **_

* * *

_**Notes Dump**_

_**Where the magic(k)al fallout from any misunderstandings between a Wizard and a Witch is safely contained. **_

_**The quote attributed to Alice Band is taken from a Guardian feature on the making of the big drama series "The Crown", about the British royal family. The full excerpt in context is: **_

He {producer Peter Morgan} is well aware of the possibility of his fiction's being mistaken for fact – even of his made-up accounts shading into the factual record. He has seen it happen. In the 2006 film _**The Queen**_, Morgan invented a scene depicting Blair's first private audience. In 2010, Blair published his autobiography. When Morgan came to read the ex-prime minister's account of that same moment, "I remember thinking, 'Hang on, that's dialogue I wrote, that I didn't get from him – so either I fluked it, clairvoyantly, or he was blurring the facts of his own memory with my fiction.'" I looked it up, and Morgan is right: the encounter described in A Journey feels remarkably similar in tone and shape to the scene in the film. Morgan argues that the relationship "between history, narrative, fact and fiction [is] so much more fluid and unreliable, but also more interesting, than anyone imagines".

* * *

**(1)** The second _official_ one, anyway.

** (2)** An optimistic former King had experimented with a Royal Lancrastrian Navy, because every self-respecting kingdom has got to have one. But the rowing boat had comer to grief on the rocks in Lancre Gorge.

** (3)** Nimue and the rest are speaking Old Morporkian, reproduced here in modern Morporkian for convenience. It has most **(3.1)** of the twenty-six letters we know and love plus the ð, the þ and the ƒ, and sometimes the ø, although this last is seen as a suspicious economic migrant from the Hubland language family. As Tolkein might have noted were he to be writing this, the Old Common Tongue is charted in a synchronous linguistic manner as Old English/Anglo-Saxon travelling through Middle to Modern English as it progresses through the centuries. Look, just imagine the witches are speaking Anglo-Saxon, albeit with a Welsh accent in one case.

**(3.1)** Z was a late entrant. It contended with the famous ƒ beloved of comedians, which looks like a small-case f but which was used to denote a hard vocalised "s" sound. Z was relatively new to the alphabet in Shakespeare's time, leading to the memorable curse and insult "Thou whoreson zed! Thou un-necessary letter!" Z and ƒ contended for the same phoneme for a couple of centuries, and as we know, Z eventually won whilst ƒ became comic fodder in words like "it ƒucketh"

**(4)** Comedian Lee Mack does a bloody funny stand-up spiel on Irish names and how they are perceived by people who only speak English. Mack was brought up in England to Irish parents and therefore claims this gives him a licence to make Irish jokes.

** (5)** The Dark Wars had happened a few hundred years earlier. The Dark Unholy Empire had emerged in Überwald and had during its life redrawn the political and geographical map of the Central Continent. Among other things, waves of displaced peoples had surged out of the contested area, and the effects of this mass migration had collapsed the Latatian Empire. Whole horse tribes surged out of the Vortex Plains at about this time, bringing their languages with them. Latatia's remnants clung on in places like Brindisi, Toleda, Skund and Quirm where the peoples spoke dialects which were a mutated and changed version of Latatian; and languages very like Llamedosian and Hergenian, formerly spoken over a far wider area, had in their turn been forced Turnwise, to lands on the coast of the ocean. Even Lancre had been changed to the point where it now spoke a language Queen Ynci would not have recognised. But somehow it remained Lancre and unchanged.

* * *

**Original story: **

_**On the FB site, a page of a mediaeval manuscript showing two dragons locked in battle was repurposed with the legend **_

_**For just five shillings a month**_

_**You can provide dragons like these**_

_**With the food and shelter and medical attention they need**_

_**Act now!(6)**_

_**The idea was to present it as a flyer for the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons. Recognising the source, I wrote a quick paragraph:**_

Ah, the Llamedosian Red and the Chalk White playing out their age-old enmity. This bloody Wizard turned up and said it was a metaphor for something or other, two peoples locked in age old enmity, but as he chundered on about it for so long, a local Witch called Nimue Jenkins locked him in a soundproof crystal box in a vain attempt to shut him up - local myth says he's still there, explaining poetic metaphor and its place in history, to this day...

_**Since then I've been having Ideas to repurpose this as a longer story. As you do. **_

_**I'm not sure if the longer story will fit here – so in the spirit of recent musings on elephants with wings, the "original" is going here together with credit for the inspiration, and the expanded and reworked story will fit in elsewhere. **_

_**Yes, I do know the title is half in Danish – found smething that appeared to work in Anglo-Saxon, though...  
**_

_**_** (6)**_ Thanks to Jake Campbell and Maureen Fedarb**_


	3. Queen of all she surveys

_**Y Coch a'r y Gwyn – Wægn îsig ac dôð read**_

_**The Red and the White**_

_**As always, v0.2, first revision  
**_

_**A longer tale based on a single paragraph written for The Ankh-Morpork Times – News of The Disc on Facebook. I wrote a one paragraph response to a posting, recognised its ultimate source (primal British myth shared by Celt, Saxon and Norman alike), and thought – why stop here? **_

* * *

_**Historical Note, prepared by Miss Alice Band (Guild of Historians), principal tutor in History, Archaeology (Stealth and Conventional), Climbing, Traps, Evasion and Archery, at the Assassins' Guild School. With input from two gifted pupils. **_

_**Again, the reader is reminded that at this distance in Time, we are necessarily working at the interface between Myth and History. History is, to a given value of the word, immutable and deals with the known facts. We know Lancre had a king called Uther Penferret, who was married to a Queen from the relatively nearby coastal state of Kernawack. A land long since absorbed into its neighbours of Llamedos and Hergen, but which, nearly two millenia ago, was a independent state which still had to perform the equivalent of a gymnastic act on a high-wire to maintain its independence. Kernawack survived in much the same manner as Djelibeybi or Urabewe in our time: by persuading its powerful neighbours that the less of a shared border they had over which wars could be fought, the better. For a Central Continent example, observe the way the Fistulan country stands between the two dominant ethnicities of Überwald and by its existence maintains both the peace and its own precarious independence.(1)**_

_**The name of the Kernawackian Queen of Lancre has not precisely been recorded in History; the three or four variant forms of her name are testament to this being the fulcrum point in the history of Lancre where the relative proportions of Myth and History are equally balanced, with History beginning to get the upper hand. But Myth is never fully absent, in any nation's history. This lesson is there, obvious and apparent, in the Tales of Lancre, that the body of History wears the clothes and the cloak of Myth. Always. As my students demonstrate in their re-telling of Birdwhistle's Myths and Legends. **_

_**Her name may not be accurately recorded, but the actions of this Queen, even by default, served to shape the history of the land of Lancre.**_

_**Lancre, at least 1500 years before "the present day" **_

Nimue Weatherwax returned to her cottage. She had been hoping nobody was watching. But she walked with her head held high, daring anyone to make comment or to draw attention to…

She opened the back door**(2)** and entered. Then breathed a sigh that was half exasperation and half relief. She glared at the kettle hanging over the hearth. A hot drink was in order. Maybe something with ground acorns in it, and maybe just a hint of valerian root. Chip a bit of sugar off the puncheon.

As the fire in the hearth flared into life, Nimue looked for the hammer and chisel needed for the puncheon. But first…

_**The Royal Palace, Lancre**_

The old Wizard bent over the bubbling flasks in his workroom. The Great Work would soon be finished, then. He adjusted a temperature, frowned, and added a little more nameless concentrate to the flask. The elixir of youth would soon be ready to apply…

He considered the current Royal Palace. Several hundred years old and in need of renovation. Or replacement. The king and queen had the best rooms, as of right. The former private quarters of the Legate who had governed Lancrastrium in the name of the Latatian Empire were theirs. The formal fortified villa which had been built on the hilltop still maintained its spacious proportions and its formal reception hall, with a pleasing Latatian floor mosaic and faded murals on the walls. As it had been a military praefectorum, the murals were a bit _basic_ and the sense of humour underpinning them somewhat _crude_, he admitted. But it was all going to go. And unless the architect of the new castle could find some way of preserving the mosaic floor, that would go too. A pity; it depicted the gods of Cori Celesti playing some sort of board game. Fine workmanship.

He switched off the heating underneath the flask. Just about ready, then. Although it needed to cool first. He studied the contents of the flask for colour, and pronounced himself satisfied.

* * *

And Gerontia Ogg met Morgana Garlleg on the edge of Lancre hamlet.

The two witches greeted each other.

"We're going the same way." Morgana said.

"Aye, maybe we are." Gerontia agreed.

There was an uneasy pause. Morgana cleared her throat.

"There's been a lot of, er, thunder and llightning llately." she hazarded.

"Unseasonal." Gerontia agreed. "Wrong time of year."

She paused, reflectively.

"Bloody wet, too. Bad for the crops."

They turned onto the trail to Bad Ass, in silent accord. As the sound of hoofbeats in the distance, at first faint, grew louder, Gerontia nodded to the undergrowth. Morgana understood. The only people who rode horses around here were those who were rich enough to be able to maintain them. Best to watch from cover, till you knew who you were dealing with.

The two Witches moved off-road. After a while Morgana thought she could hear tinkling bells, a counterpoint to the hoofbeats.

"..at every lock of her horse's mane, hung fifty silver bells and nine…" she hummed.

Gerontia shook her head.

"Nah. That's a _different_ Queen, that is." she said. "And touch iron, girl!" **(3)**

Morgana touched the nearest iron. You never knew.

"Never understood that one." Gerontia mused. "Fifty-nine silver bells on _every _lock of a horse's mane. Silver weighs heavy. Lots of mane on a horse…"

Morgana sighed and was about to explain about _poetic llicence_, and then the two riders passed by. The woman was startlingly blonde, expensively dressed, and her white horse did indeed have silver bells threaded into its mane**(4),** as well as being attached to its harness and tracery. She also seemed to be getting on very well indeed with the mounted warrior she was with. The two Witches observing from the forest were not even noticed.

Gerontia shook her head as they cantered off into the distance.

"It'll end in tears, mark my words." she said. "Uther said if she goes off for a ride in the countryside, she should have an escort. As befits her status as his Queen, see. So he gives her his best warrior and he sez, Lance, do the honours, would you?"

Morgana looked primly disapproving.

"But the king's chosen knight should be respectfull, he should know his station, and ride at a distance, and watch for perills…"

"What, Lancelot Pegley? Allus been full of himself. That bugger's always had an eye for the ladies. Got him into bother a few times. And nothin's a secret in Lancre, girl. Bet everyone knows, 'cept for Uther!"

"And he never saw us." Morgana remarked.

"Some bloody escort." Gerontia said. "Too much of an eye for _her_. Queen Migraine. Huh. Nim was right. That woman's a bloody headache."

She shook her head.

"And speakin' of Nim…"

They returned to the path and carried on towards Nimue's cottage.

* * *

In his rooms at the Royal Palace, the old wizard studied his cooling brew, one of the nameless potions he had been working on. It was an old Ephebian preparation he'd learnt about at the university when researching in the lore of the preceding centuries, a secret known to none except Wizards.

He considered the magnitude of the move he was making and of the potion he was about to administer to himself. He was seventy-six years old. His hair was grey. He'd never seen the need for this. Until now. He'd met Her. Something in Her called to him. His muse, his anima, his Queen in Red.

His plan was worked out. He would take this in ever more concentrated does over the next weeks. He'd bill it as… well, it would help his image if he made out that he'd found the secret of youth. That he was now growing younger. Reversing ageing. The local peasants would be credulous. They'd believe it.

He dipped a comb into the potion, saturating it. Then he began drawing it through his hair, refreshing it in the liquid every so often…

…and his hair began to look fuller and less grey. **(5)**

* * *

"Blessings upon this house." Morgana said, making the Witch-bow.

"Wotcher, Nim." Gerontia said, stepping in. "Got anythin' to drink on the hearth?"

Nimue glowered at them both, then produced her other two goblets.

She stiffened as she heard Gerontia exclaim

"Ooh, _Nim_! Somebody bin sendin' you _flowers_, then?"

Nimue Weatherwax gritted her teeth and chipped sugar off the puncheon perhaps a little more vigorously than it called for, then she poured three goblets of a valerian-and-bergamot and-honey preparation. It had been too much to hope for that Gerontia Ogg would not have noticed. But the flowers, if you could call them that, those damn roses, were there, in the nearest thing to a vase that she could find.

"Spoils the effect, really, that all you could find in a hurry was the guzunder." Gerontia said, critically.

"It's clean." Nimue said, defensively. Her life had not had room for fripperies like vases before. There had been no real call for them as nobody had ever given Nimue Weatherwax flowers. Till now.

Gerontia made a sympathetic noise.

"I'll send one of the girls round with a spare vase, Nim. Got plenty."

Morgana looked critically at the roses. Something was _odd_ about them…

"'sides, you're going to want the guzunder for its proper job…" Gerontia said.

"Hmmph." said Nimue. "Always assuming they're still shaped like roses in the mornin'."

She looked at Morgana and made what might have been an approving nod.

"You worked it out then, girl."

"Ah." Gerontia said. "THOSE sort of flowers. Typical bloody wizards, cheapskates. Never buy a bouquet, when you can magic a bunch of cow parsley you picks out of the ditch to look like roses."

Nimue nodded, as near to ruefully as she could.

"But you din't refuse them."

Nimue Weatherwax shook her head.

"What can you do, Gerontia? He's took it into his head to show me his magic. Thought this spell called Thingy's Surprisin' Bouquet would delight me. Had to accept 'em."

"Ah. He's been tryin' to teach you magic?"

Nimue shrugged, stood up and moved to the waste-bin near the sink. She pulled out a cabbage stalk, soggy, limp and a little bit slimy, and contemplated it. She muttered a few words…

.. and as the octarine flash faded, she was suddenly holding a single long-stemmed rose. She stalked across the room and added it to the other roses in the guzunder.

"He thinks he's bin teachin' me magic. Cheek of the man. Wizard magic's _easy_ if you gets your head in the right place. And I tell you what, Gerontia Ogg. I don't need no bloody staff to point at things."

She extended a thoughtful finger. The two other witches edged out of its way.

"I did notice." Gerontia said, "we bin havin' some unseasonal thunder and lightnin' lately. An' _loads_ of rain."

There was a long reflective silence. The three witches considered their drinks.

"Well, we better go talk to this Wizard what's sweet on our Nim." Gerontia decided.

"And maybe we can find out about what's been happening at the castle too?" Morgana asked.

"good point." Gerontia said.

Nimue frowned.

"Well, gets us in the Castle." she conceded. "Guests of the Wizard. If Queen Headache don't like it, she can complain to him."

* * *

The wizard Merddyn, or perhaps Marvin, contemplated the bubbling apparatus on his workbench and nursed it anxiously. The arrangement of glass and metal tubes and flasks, strategically heated by very carefully placed and regulated heat-sources, was commonplace at Unseen University and its supporting service industries in Ankh-Morpork. Merddyn had realised it was completely un-known here, out in the rural sticks, a backwater kingdom separated from the great twin cities by perhaps seven hundred miles of Geography and, he suspected, four or five centuries of Time. He smiled. It was all good advertising for his status as The Great Court Wizard. Bubbling concoctions in flasks, strange chemical smells, droplets of mysterious and odd-smelling liquids being teased out of the end of the distillation tubes and dripping into a flask that was very carefully collecting it, drop by precious drop… and the best of it was that the raw material was abundant here.

He sniffed the air, critically: the smell could be likened to something with yeast and sugar and hops in its distant ancestry, but somehow elevated and lifted and sublimated to a higher plane of existence. It was strong, but not overpowering. It had a sort of chemical knife aspect to it and cleared the sinuses wonderfully. But it wasn't the sort of _sniff-this-and-you-die_ chemical knife edge that some other things had, like boiling acids or mercury fumes.

Merddyn frowned. There was a new occupational class emerging in Ankh-Morpork, one without the thousands of years of experience of wizards. They called themselves _alchemists _and had a sort of amateurish approach, as if they were somehow drawn to bubbling mercury fumes, and hadn't yet grasped some essential survival skills, like the one concerning dipping your finger in and tasting, just to see what it did. Which, if the _it_ was hydrogen cyanide, made it a short and conclusive lesson.

_The Gods made prussic acid that sort of unappealing dark blue-green colour for a reason_, the Wizard thought.

He watched the slightly oily clear drips with professional pride. It looked, to the inexperienced eye, like water. But it was lighter somehow, a superior sort of water, water with life, the platonic essence of water and a thousand times more valuable…

"Sublimation." he said to himself.

Then the voice behind him said

"Sublime what, mister?"

The wizard jumped. He thought he'd left clear instructions to the guards not to let anyone in…

_**Earlier in the day, near the foothills of Copperhead Mountain. **_

"Impressive." Nimue Weatherwax had said, trying to sound impressed and enthusiastic.

The Wizard beamed and swelled with pride, hearing only respect for his magical skills. He took a few more steps, and any watching mime artistes**(6)** would have applauded the way he was now apparently descending an invisible staircase to true ground level.

"A levitation spell to take me a whole three feet above ground." he explained. "A mass inversion spell to make me light as a feather. But an inertial compensation spell, so that the air recognises I still have substance, to it, so that I am not blown about as if I am a feather. The three spells together combine, to give the illusion of flight."

Nimue grunted, and then realised she had to at least _pretend _to be impressed.

"I really liked it when you laid down on your front and pretended to be a bird in flight!" she said, trying hard to channel Gerontia Ogg, and trying not to remember the elderly Wizard simulating flight four feet above ground level. It had been like watching an old man swimming in the shallow end. And doggy-paddling, at that.

"But, Mister Wizard. Can't you go any _higher_ than that?"

Merddyn, or was it Marvin, scowled for a second. Then he smiled.

"Alas. Flight into the higher airs is a secret known only to Adepts of the Eighth level." he said, regretfully. "I regret I am only a Wizard of the Fifth Level."

He remembered why he had had to leave Ankh-Morpork in a hurry, having annoyed Wizards of the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth; the Master of The Order of the Hoodwinkers, his own Order, had said there was a vacancy for a Court Wizard in this Gods-awful rustic Kingdom, sounds like a skin disease, better for everyone if you accepted it, coach leaves at three, do NOT let the sun go down on you in this city tonight, if I were you I'd get packing.

"Mass transference is involved." the Wizard said, trying to forget that one reason for his leaving town in a hurry was that he owed Cosimo The Vindictive three thousand dollars and he still had no clear idea as to how he'd pay it back. He'd also tried the fairy gold stunt as a diversion, which had bought him respite until the following morning… long enough to get a head-start. "I believe to ascend, I should persuade an equivalent mass which is currently above me to descend. Some of those loose looking boulders higher up the slope, perhaps…"

Nimue shook her head.

"Got a good spell for stoppin' an avalanche?" she asked, practically.

The Wizard smiled, trying to make it look as if he had taken this into account and was waiting for her to catch up.

"Perhaps, madam, a different sort of Magick?" he asked, sounding the "k".

Nimue tried not to scowl at the un-necessary letter. Thunder sounded in the distance. She nodded assent.

Marvin, or was it Merddyn, brightened up.

"I know. Perhaps fire-spells?"

He smiled, benignly, at her.

"It must be boring for you to have to watch, and not to participate?" he offered. "Fire-spells should be within the more restricted range of Magicks available to women with necessarily limited competence for Magick. If you wish, I could teach you how to do a basic fireball?"

Nimue stood and nodded her acceptance of the idea. She forced herself to show appreciation for his generous offer.

And overhead, more thunder rolled…

* * *

The witches had just walked into the royal palace. Gerontia Ogg had smiled benignly at the gate-guards and asked after their health. Nimue had nodded to them. The guard had stood aside, hurriedly.

"Where's Kingy right now, our Orm?" Gerontia asked. The young guard had considered for a second.

"Got his … Knights… in conference, Auntie." He replied. "Tryin' to make that Round Table idea work. You know, twenty people sat round a table that can only seat eight, tops. Problem is, to get a round table big enough to sit twenty, means getting a living room that's four or five times bigger. Else table won't fit. So they has to take turns. And even now, if you put the salt and vinegar and pepper in the middle of the table, you has to really reach to get it."

Gerontia grinned.

"Another of Queenie's bright ideas?" she asked.

"What do _you_ think, Auntie?"

Morgana, the disregarded third, followed them in. They looked around the squared-off and rectangular form of the dilapidated castrum, built according to Latatian logic. Gerontia looked down at the mosaic floor and cackled.

"Allus gives me a laugh." she remarked. "Blind Io turnin' himself into a golden shower an' splashin' all over the maiden's lap. Bet she weren't pleased."

"Gerontia…" Nimue said.

"She give birth to a bonny bouncin' ingot nine months later, by all accounts…"

"This way." Morgana said, urgently. "Can't you smell it?"

Gerontia sniffed the air. Something strong, indefinable, and somehow compelling…

"Wonder what he's up to?" she mused. And she pushed a door open...

* * *

"Sublime what, mister?" Gerontia asked, standing on tiptoe to look over the wizard's shoulder. The old Wizard jumped, then turned to scowl at the Witches. When he saw one of them was Nimue, the scowl turned into a rictus smile.

Morgana, disregarded again, tried not to shudder at how _icky_ it was all becoming. As a Witch, she knew she was expected to be able to look directly at horrible and unwholesome things and to deal with them without flinching. Yet there was something that was definitely _ick_ about the ageing Wizard who was obviously pretty much taken with Nimue.

"Ah, dear lady." he said. "You are always welcome in my workshop. But…"

He turned and looked down to regard Gerontia, who was grinning all over her face.

"Well, mister, she's a single woman in a single man's rooms. You can look at Morgana and me as her _chaper-o-nees_. So as we can say afterwards there was nothin' untoward goin' on. Ain't that right, Nim? Morgana?"

The wizard scowled slightly. Morgana studied him intently.

"You've been putting dye in your hair?" she asked, scrutinising him. "It's a llitlllle bit _llighter _than it was yesterday. Lless _grey."_

The wizard reddened slightly. Then, after an inner conflict that showed on his face, he decided to be conciliatory. Morgana could see this was costing him.

"My dear young woman, do I detect the dulcet tones of Llamedos in your voice?" he asked. _"__Rwy'n dod o'r Llamedos hefyd."_

_Really? _Morgana replied._ You don't sound Llamedosian._

_-I have been to many strange and mysterious places, many not of this Discworld. I have travelled the Planes. I have seen things of which men wot not. You become more cosmopolitan._

Morgana shrugged.

_-Pant-y-Girdl docks on a Saturday night is strange and eldritch enough. Or when the Druids are out for a drink after the fifteen-a-side blows full time. Have you ever seen a drunken Druid trying to fly a menhir?_

"What's she sayin', Gerontia? Bloody Llamedosians. I'm sure they only speak that language to annoy us and so they can talk about us behind our fronts."

Gerontia nudged Morgana.

"He ain't putting a hex on us, is he, Morg?"

"No, Gerontia. We're both from the same country."

"Good. 'Cos I got a hex up me sleeve to throw straight back…"

Then she nudged the Wizard.

"So what's all _this_ for, Mr Wizard? 'Cos I bet you don't set all this up just to brew up some hair dye!"

Morgana sighed.

_-You know, I remember my old mamgu telling me about a failed Druid called Merddyn. He had to leave Pant-Y-Girdl in a bit of a hurry, which was something to do with the sacrificial Solstice virgin suddenly not being a worthy sacrifice any more. And the Druidical offertory box next to the standing stone was suddenly a lot lighter on the arian, and when the high arch-Druid took a close look, a couple of the sacred golden sickles turned out to have blades made of lead, with gold paint on the top…_

_-Okay, I developed a late and unexpected vocation for magic and went to Ankh-Morpork… but that was fifty years ago!_

Morgana smiled at him, and then at the other witches, who were trying not to look puzzled.

"Llamedos is a small country, Nimue, Gerontia. My granny might have known him. She said it was a shame he had to lleave town to take up a schollarship at the Wizarding College in Ankh-Morpork…"

There was an embarrassed pause.

Gerontia Ogg had been industriously searching around and was poking in amongst all the wizarding paraphernalia, which was exerting a fascination on her.

"'Ere, mister! There's a barrel of beer down here! Smells like… _tastes like_… best bitter from the Goat and Compasses!"

"Errr… do be careful down there, madam, some of that apparatus is really quite delicate… hard to replace and it could be dangerous to the Great Work if it gets upset or damaged…" the wizard said, glad for the distraction.

"Yes, but what's it _for_?" Gerontia persisted. "Looks like you're boilin' up good beer at this end, and only a few drops of somethin' clear is comin' out the other." Gerontia persisted. "Waste of good ale, to my way of thinkin'!"

"Ah. That's where you're wrong, madam. Let me explain…"

Nimue nudged Morganna while the explanation happened.

"Seems to me he was desperate to change the subject." she said. "He wouldn't be so keen on tellin' the secret of this wizarding to Gerontia, else. What did you say that made his mouth open and close like a stranded fish?"

Nimue's eyes bored into Morgana's.

"Tell you later, Nimue." she said. Conversation went on in the background as Morgana, under a diamond glare, decided it was possibly best to give in.

-Well_, madam. Beer in its way is a minor magic. You brew it? And cider? And you've noted its euphoric effect on the human psyche, as if some component within it acts as an agent that affects the system?_

"You'll tell me_ now, _Morgana Garlleg. While Gerontia's distractin' his attention!"

-_Oh aye, yes. People gets drunk. They go red, they laugh and cry, they gets happy, they can get angry sometimes, they does stuff they might not have done if they hadn't been drinkin', you drinks too much and you falls over or you throws up, and a bad batch gives you a foul head the next day…_

"I'll whisper it in your ear, Nimue.."

-_Well, the brewing of ale and cider is a minor magick, well within the capability of women with a limited capacity for magick, such as the typical village witch…_

Morgana tried not to notice the way Gerontia Ogg's eyes suddenly narrowed. She wondered why the wizard seemed absolutely blind to the warning signs.

_-But we Guardians of the Higher Magicks believe there is some sort of living Essence, some sort of spirituous component, within the baser drinks like beer, and the higher-order beverages such as wine, which can be concentrated and isolated..._

"I see. Your old granny in Llamedos knew him, did she? _Very _int'res'tin."

Gerontia had reverted to a look that said "tell me everything, mr Wizard, but make it simple for this simple village woman", crossed with a slightly open-mouthed flirtatiousness. In its way, this was an art form…

_-Crude ale is ninety per cent water, you see. If we remove as much of those none-tenths of water as we can, but gently, do gently, so as not to drive off or destroy the Living Essence.._

_-Oh, we does that too, in winter, with applejack. Leave the cider out in the cold and keep taking off the ice as it forms. Makes it flat, but stronger._

_-Ah, the ill-educated peasant way. Fractional distillation takes out more of the water and leaves more of the essence. Let me show you the operation of the condensation coils here… water stays behind. The spirituous essence, being lighter and more ethereal, comes this way…_

"Bit of a crook and a criminal in his youth. Failed Druid. Went Wizard. Gets an education so he can suddenly be all respectable. Comes back. I see, hopin' everybody's forgot.." Nimue said, with a grim little smile.

They watched Gerontia getting a Wizard-level education for a while.

_-So you can drink this stuff, Mr Wizard? _

_-Well, in very small measured glasses, yes. But the spirituous essences of barley and wine have other, higher, uses in Wizardry and have been noted to have a beneficial medicinal effect if externally applied to wounds…_

_-Got a glass, Mr Wizard? _

_-Mrs Ogg, I counsel caution… _

"Err… Ladies? Her Majesty's just found out you're in the Palace. She is pis… not happy. Can we ask you to come with us? Please?"

The three witches turned to look at the armed guards who had just walked in. They were local Lancre men who didn't seem very happy about the order to arrest the Witches and being them before the Queen for judgement. They shuffled, uneasily. It didn't help that Nimue smiled pleasantly at them.

"Be delighted." she said. "Ain't been invited for a chat with King Uther for a long time. _Not since he got wed_. We knows the way. You lads can tag on behind, if you like. Coming, girls?"

"Ye Gods, Nim. That stuff's _strong_!" Gerontia remarked. "an' there I was, thinkin' it was a wicked waste of good ale!"

"Come along, Gerontia." Nimue said, exasperated. "Time we went for a chat with our Queen. Don't know about you two, but I got loads to say to her."

"Please. Ma'am." the sergeant said, pleadingly. "You _are_ under arrest for trespass."

"Sergeant?" the wizard said. "Miss Weatherwax is my guest. And as Mrs Ogg so rightly said, it is good for the look of the thing if she was chaperoned…"

"You'd better come along too, sir. To explain. I'm _sure_ this can be sorted out."

Witches, wizard and escort then proceeded to the presence of the Queen, one of the Witches beginning to hum a song about a hedgehog whilst another hissed at her to pipe it down. The third Witch asked the Sergeant, in the presence of his men, if the ointment she'd made up for the _little problem_ was working?

A temporary marquee had been set up in the courtyard to allow for a makeshift Royal Reception Suite whilst building was going on higher up the castle mount. The Witches looked at the building sitewith interest: it was the first time they'd been able to get this close, what with the Queen's ban on their going anywhere near the Castle. It looked worse from closer to, a disordered wreck of part-built collapsed walls and rubble, with discarded tools and the usual builders' debris of heaped gravel and sand along with sacks of cement. As one witch, they ignored the ornate pavilion tent, bedecked in drapings and the Lancre colours of yellow and black, and walked past it to look into the sad beginnings of the new castle keep.

"Hmmm." Nimue said, thoughtfully. "What do you reckon, Gerontia?"

As they looked thoughtfully into the deep stone-lined pit and surveyed the mounded rubble inside it, there was an angry female noise from somewhere behind them.

"Guards! I thought you had those women under arrest and in custody!"

The imperious words were spoilt by the shrill tones, and by the somewhat rustic accent, which had overtones of somebody whose role in life was to operate a milk-churn or dispense clotted cream and scones**.(7) **None of the witches moved.

"Sir Lancelot!" the shrill voice cried. "My ' ansum good knight! Bring those women to me! _In chains_, if you have to!"

The witches turned and acknowledged Lancelot Pegley, a well-built man in his early thirties. It was true he was good-looking, in a rough-hewn and greasy kind of way; but right now he was looking awkward in unfamiliar clothing that was completely new to Lancre. Gerontia grinned.

"Her _ansum_?" she demanded, grinning broadly.

"Since when have they made you a _knight_, Lance Pegley?" Nimue demanded. "Plain _mister_ ain't good enough no more?"

"I don't think much of that haircut." Morgana said, assessing him critically.

Lancelot Pegley coloured.

"Now don't be difficult, ma'ams." he said. "Her Majesty wants to see you. And the king made me a Knight. With the sword and everything. Her Majesty said there should be Knights."

"Those tights don't suit you." Morgana went on. "And those shoes with the curled over points."

"And that fancy shirt." Nimue added.

"All the rage in Tintagel, apparently." Pegley said, after an uneasy pause. "And all the knights there do their hair this way."

"Makes you look like a proper p.."

"Gerontia." Nimue said, warningly.

"I was going to call him a pillock. What else did you think I was going to say, begins with a pee?"

Then Nimue smiled. This was more unsettling than a scowl.

"Lead on, Sir Knight." she said. She even offered him her arm.

_**To be completed in the next chapter…**_

_**Yes, I do know the title is half in Danish – couldn't find an online translator for Anglo-Saxon, so Danish will have to stand in, for now.**_

**(1) **I really thought I'd invented a new OC (Original Country) when the idea occured to me that Überwald, if it has "Germans" at one end and "Russians" at the other, must therefore have space for a landscape of other "Eastern European" ethnicities... after all, TP himself, before having to Retcon, gave the three Sto States Polish names (really true!) so they that would have, from a British perspective, something "other" about them. Later on, with Borogravia and Zlobenia having a somewhat Austro-Hungarian/Balkan feel to them, "Eastern Europe" moved away from Ankh-Morpork, as you might roughly expect. So. Given Germany and Russia having what is delicately referred to as a History of lively interaction, I wondered about the country whose fate it is to be sandwiched in between. A bit of skewed thinking about Polish rivers and the fact that in English "Vistula" sounds like a medical condition... the River Fistula was born. And the Fistulan people living on both banks, who find both Fritz and Ivan to be hard work. And then I looked at the Compleat Discworld Atlas. And what do I find there in Far Überwald. The mighty and majestic River Fistula. Canonically, the Discworld's "Poland". Reality and fan fic blur.**  
**

**(2)** She actually _had_ a back door. Other residents in the area noted this and said "That's posh, innit? Two doors?" Nimue used it as a convenient way of getting around the beehives, the goatshed and the herb garden. It made more sense than going out the front and walking round the back. People seeking her services understood this and now routinely went to knock on the back door. A well-worn path had been trodden in the grass, in fact. Her front door was hardly ever used these days.

** (3)** From Thomas The Rhymer, the old Scottish poem about an earthly bard abducted by the Queen of the Elves. Now touch metal.

** (4)** But not the poetically mandated fifty-nine per lock, the reality-dictated quite a few less.

** (5)** The book of spells he'd found the recipe in had the title _Ye Cosmetick Grimoire of ye Mage Vydal Sassoon_. This particular potion, for external use only, was a spell to Restore Ye Original Pigmentation Of Ye Pellicular Growth and was called _Ephebian MM._

** (6) **There still weren't many. Latatian law had permitted clowns to form trade guilds and teach their skills. They were jolly useful for keeping the proles and the plebs entertained in between bouts in the arena, whilst slaves did the necessary cleaning-up of corpses, bodily parts, and blood-encrusted sand. However, successive Latatian Emperors had decreed that any Clown stepping across the line into mime artistry _also _had his place in the Arena and could entertain the groundlings. Usually while frantically miming "Help! I am being torn to pieces by lions!"

** (7)** sorry, readers from Devon and Cornwall. Looking up useful dialect English from Cornwall (Kernawac) – location of the Arthurian Tintagel – to slip in where I can… "_ansum_" apparently means "good-looking man" (handsome)

_**Notes Dump**_

_**Where the magic(k)al fallout from any misunderstandings between a Wizard and a Witch is safely contained. **_

_**Oh Gods – got to use some of this stuff in future fics… off to look up this show on youTube… **_

_Purno de Purno_, another series from VPRO (see the Live-Action TV folder). With characters such as the "Kietelaar" (a Dutch word for clitoris), politically incorrect gags about sex, homosexuality and bodily functions, political commentary and very suggestive imagery. Most likely Dutch TV shows back then were very good and Moral Guardians feared that they would get flamed if they attacked those shows so they flamed anime instead. Incidentally, Hans Peter Wessels, the person who created _Purno de Purno_, would create _another_ Subverted Kids Show in 2002 called _Ffukkie Slim_.

Part three of "The Price of flight – Olga's horrible realisation that they'll have to recruit flight-Wizards. Early days yet, but the idea of aircrew who are not Witches and not actually capable of flying the things has been conceded. They have Feegle, after all, to navigate. But with the Service expanding and the new flying elephants needing a larger crew, together with other organisational challenges, requires new thinking. There is also the issue of the new Air Base for the Heavy Squadron, for instance.

**Original story: **

_**On the FB site, a page of a mediaeval manuscript showing two dragons locked in battle was repurposed with the legend **_

_**For just five shillings a month**_

_**You can provide dragons like these**_

_**With the food and shelter and medical attention they need**_

_**Act now! (Source credits as previously)**_

_**The idea was to present it as a flyer for the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons. Recognising the source, I wrote a quick paragraph:**_

Ah, the Llamedosian Red and the Chalk White playing out their age-old enmity. This bloody Wizard turned up and said it was a metaphor for something or other, two peoples locked in age old enmity, but as he chundered on about it for so long, a local Witch called Nimue Jenkins locked him in a soundproof crystal box in a vain attempt to shut him up - local myth says he's still there, explaining poetic metaphor and its place in history, to this day...

_**Since then I've been having Ideas to repurpose this as a longer story. As you do. **_

_**I'm not sure if the longer story will fit here – so in the spirit of recent musings on elephants with wings, the "original" is going here together with credit for the inspiration, and the expanded and reworked story will fit in elsewhere. **_

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_

_**To: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**MEMORANDUM **_

_**From: Mr Thos. Cropper (Overseer) **_

_**To: J.H.C. Goatberger (Proprietor)**_


End file.
